What Are You Carrying Into Your Next Age?
Lately, I have been thinking about birthdays as endings. My friend Ivy Felicia calls a birthday a personal new year. I love that framing because birthdays are thresholds, and thresholds give us an opportunity to consider what can and cannot come with us into the year/age ahead.
The idea for a birthday grief session became clear to me during a private session that happened to fall on someone’s birthday. We hadn't planned it that way, but the timing helped us see how much the date was holding. Younger versions of the person were there. So were losses that had been minimized, and old experiences that were still influencing how they lived.
A birthday can offer us a particular kind of access to all of that.
I am not talking about leaving grief behind. I am talking about making time to see what you have been carrying, what has already ended, and what might need death care before you plant yourself into another year of your life.
Sometimes that death care is a conversation. Sometimes it is a boundary, a release, a move, a movement, or a ceremony that makes an ending real enough for you to stop living like it has not happened.
This is the thinking behind my Private Birthday Death Care Sessions.
Booking a session is already an act of grieftending. You have trusted yourself enough to give your time, money, and attention to the grief still influencing your life, and to invest in skilled companionship for tending it. That is a significant choice to make on your own behalf.
When we meet, your birthday becomes our point of entry. I bring my discernment, witness, and death-care training to what is specific to you. Before the session even begins, you have already changed your relationship with your grief by choosing to tend it.
There can still be cake. There can be joy. and pretty shit. and good food. Grieftending does not require us to turn away from celebration. It just gives us a way to tell the actual-ass truth while we are there.
If your birthday is coming up, or recently passed, and this feels like the kind of gift you want to give yourself, you can learn more about the session here.
Akilah S Richards
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